


get myself back home soon

by plinys



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: 5 Times, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2017-11-05
Packaged: 2019-01-29 22:38:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12640746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: Five times Rip nearly crossed paths with Sara during his five years of setting up the Time Bureau + the one time they finally met again.





	get myself back home soon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AllisonSwan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllisonSwan/gifts).



> HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAII!!! I HOPE YOU ENJOY THIS!!

1

He tells himself that he chose  _ this  _ city of all places purely out of convenience. 

That real estate prices were low following the earthquake and with everything going on in this city, nobody would really notice them moving it. Nothing to see here. 

It sounds reasonable enough in his head.

He makes it sound official when he presents it to the United Nations.

He makes it sound diplomatic and vague when he informs the Mayor of Starling City that his team will be moving it.

He makes it sound rehearsed before explaining the concept to his new recruits.

Recruits that he had picked out specifically for their discretion. Not like before. Not when he had been assembling a team of superheros and supervillains that never were more than a footnote on the grand scheme of time. This time he chooses carefully: ex-military, ex-time masters, or just people with discretion and level heads and no impact on the timeline.

People that don’t question him, that accept the status quo and mission without debate. 

A distinct change from the Legends. 

Though he seems unable to escape the team that is waiting for him at a fixed point. Looking into each of his new recruits faces he can see the similarities, features that are put together in a way that is just close enough, optimistic demeanors that he’d seen on so few others, a knack for solving problems in just the  _ right  _ way.  

It took a year without them to set up the Time Bureau and now, when he picks his base of operations he sets himself four years back. Four years to sort out everything he’s feeling and get back to the team.

To get back to  _ Sara _ . 

There is another part of him, a traitorous small part of him, that knows exactly why Starling City was the first city that came to mind when picking a new base of operations. It’s a risk, one he’s carefully assessed. A challenge for him. To let time pass as it should without interference. 

Not to think about the one woman that Starling City will always belong to, even when she’s not on these streets, even when the version of her he knows too well is in temporal stasis waiting for him to turn her world upside down. 

Still.

He walks past a graveyard with a headstone reading out her name. 

He smiles tightly at a police officer sniffing around the cities newest inhabitants. 

He chooses a second in command with blonde hair and features that could almost be familiar in the right light. 

He pretends he doesn’t think of Sara.

“I assure you, Agent Sharpe, Starling City was a purely economical decision.” 

She looks at him with eyes that remind him of the only other person whose been able to see right through him, “Why don’t I believe you?” 

  
  


2

He is acutely aware of when Sara is in Starling City.

There’s some mission he should be working on, an anachronism, papers to fill, the sort of work that he had never imagined for himself but now finds that he rather enjoys doing. It’s simple and easy, and comforting in the chaos that has been his mind for a while.

But he can’t focus on any of that.

Not when the agents -  _ his  _ agents - start whispering, hushed voices about the newest vigilante in the city. 

A blonde woman, dressed in leather, with a bow staff and a bad attitude. 

Sara.

It seems she’s finally arrived. 

Suddenly all that seems to matter is the fact that she is here. In the same city as him. A Sara so different from the one that he knows, younger, not less jaded because this is a Sara that has survived the island, but harsher perhaps in different ways. As assassin. 

He would have to meet her to know.

Though doing so would mess up the timeline. 

Even if it would soothe the ache which is near constant in his chest, the ache that Rip tries not to focus on, tries not to contemplate what it might mean. 

Instead he listens to his agents talk about the newest vigilante in town, with the sort of hushed tones they reserve for discussions that they think he wouldn’t approve of, before snagging a newspaper off of Agent Green’s desk with a blurry photograph of Starling City’s newest development.  

He unfurls the paper to reveal the article and blurry photo accompanying it. It doesn’t capture her likeness, not properly, but he knows. He would know her anywhere, in any time.  

“Is she an anachronism, sir?”

“No,” he says, “Not this one. Not yet.” 

There’s confusion on Agent Green’s face, and he can’t even begin to explain, so he folds the paper up carefully, before tucking it under his arm and asking, “How was the 1930s?”

  
  


3

All of that carefully planning and careful avoidance is nearly is wasted in an instant, because he’s crossing the street intending for a night of cheap takeout and trying not to focus on how the latest anachronism might have hit a bit too close to home.

And there she is.

Leather jacket. Ripped jeans. That familiar head of blonde hair.  

Sara.

But the Sara of years before, the Sara that never knew him. 

Close enough to reach out and touch if he were willing to break all of time just to feel her there, alive and well. 

It’s instinctual, inevitable, his body acting out on it’s own accord, moving forward on a collision course, just barely, shoulders bumping together as they pass, but enough. 

Sara - alive, and real, beside him.

There’s no real reaction from her, because she’s walking right past him. An odd look shot in his direction, the words “Watch it,” falling from her lips, before she’s back on track moving on right past him like nothing happened.

Whereas he is standing stock still in the intersection unable to move, because this wasn’t according to plan.

A part of him hates himself for giving into the impulse.

Another part of him reveals in the feeling of her there for a moment, the pitch of her voice, spoken as if to a stranger.

For that is what he is to her.

A stranger, in a well pressed suit, standing in the middle of the street, only snapping back to himself when the sound of a car horn blaring snaps him back to the real world. 

Sara long gone once more.

He checks the timeline that evening and the evening following and the evening following that, but nothing changes, it’s still the same. He isn’t sure whether the breath he finally lets out is relief or disappointment.

  
  


4

“You need a drink.”

He wonders how she knows. How obvious it is? What must show in his features? Linger there in the rumpled cut of his normally fine pressed suit, in the way he’s been staring at the same report for hours. 

He knows the day Sara dies, the exact moment, the curse of foresight, of knowing what is to come, what must come, and being unable to interfere and stop anything in the meantime. 

A fixed point. 

And yet, he still stares at the date, circled on his calendar with red pen, with a sense of finality.

This is fate.

But it is not the end.

He, of all people, should find comfort in that.

And yet, for a moment he can’t. 

For a moment he considers changing all of time, just to save one woman. 

He can’t. They can’t. They’re supposed to be the gatekeepers of time and this is one inevitability that he must suffer through. It would not be the first time she died in the same city as him, though at least this time it would not be by his hand. 

“I need a drink,” he agrees. 

Agent Sharpe - Ava, as she tells him to call him three drinks into the night - is good at distractions, telling him stories of the life she left behind, nearly a thousand years in a future that might never actually exist, living in cities that floated up in the sky. He tells her stories of his own future, the family he had and lost, the reason this all began in the first place.

Somehow it’s easier talking about them than it is talking about the reason he’s here.

In a bar.

In Starling. 

Waiting for time to pass.

“I think I was in love with her.”

“Your wife?” 

“No, I -” he pauses because it’s nearly too much, “I loved Miranda, but I think after that I - I was moving on and I might have been-”

“I think you’re drunk,” Ava says pointedly as she cuts him off.  

He is, but that’s not the point. “I think it’s too late.” 

  
  


5

“You’ll never guess what today is?” 

Her voice is dry and uninflected as she asks, “Your birthday?”

“No.”

If he’s being honest he’s not sure when his birthday is, or even how old he is. Though that is a point for another discussion. One with someone who will happily sit beside him, spreading out data and charts and asking for Gideon’s assistance as they get to the bottom of it all.

Not here.

Not now.

Not on this day. 

“In another part of this city, another version of me is assembling a team of  _ Legends _ .” 

There’s something soft and fond in his tone.

Something that is not reflected in hers, “It really is a shame you can’t stop yourself now before this whole mess happens.”

“Yes, I suppose it is.” 

  
  


+1

“Well, you really have buggered everything up this time.”

 


End file.
